]]>Jon Stewart, Elmo and your favorite local radio station are coming to Chromecast, thanks to another wave of apps adding support for Google’s streaming stick. Comedy Central, Sesame Street Go, Nickelodeon, TuneIN, Epix, YuppTV and Encore all now support casting to Chromecast and the Nexus Player, Google announced Tuesday morning.

Epix and Encore do require users to sign in with their pay TV credentials before accessing full episodes, but both Nickelodeon and Comedy Central make some content available without authentication. For example, the latest episodes of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report are available without a TV subscription. Sesame Street Go also doesn’t require viewers to have cable, but instead charges $4 per month for access to full episodes.

Google hasn’t released a total app count for Chromecast, but a spokesperson recently told me that there are “hundreds of apps” that support Chromecast.

]]>Sony’s upcoming internet TV service got its first major content injection Wednesday, with Sony announcing that it has struck a deal to add 22 networks from Viacom to the service’s channel lineup. The deal will also give Sony TV subscribers access to Viacom’s TV Everywhere apps and video-on-demand services.

This is the first time that Viacom has struck a deal with an internet-based TV service for its content, which will include networks like MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, VH1 and Spike, but also lesser-known networks like VH1 Soul, BET Gospel and Palladia.

In other words: Sony got the whole package — and that may be a problem: As companies like Sony and Dish prepare to launch internet-based TV services, they’re struggling to figure out how to differentiate themselves from traditional pay TV, which younger viewers are fleeing because of high costs and inflexible channel bundles.

No one in the industry seems to be ready for a real pick-and-chose type unbundled service, but even traditional cable operators have long tried to only get the popular networks their viewers are actually watching, as opposed to the take-it-or-leave it bundles like the one that Viacom is now selling Sony.

The fact that Sony had to pay for all 22 channels sets a precedent for its deals with other networks, and virtually guarantees that Sony’s final line-up of channels will look very much like your average cable or satellite TV subscription today, complete with the hefty price tag — which will make it that much harder for the service to actually get people to subscribe.

]]>No Daily Show for you: Customers of Cable One, a smaller cable company with 730,000 paying subscribers across 13 states, have been unable to watch their favorite Comedy Central shows, as well as any other Viacom programming, for weeks. The blackout also extends to online programming, and now FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is starting to pay attention.

Viacom’s channels went dark on Cable One’s TV line-up in early April because the two companies couldn’t agree on how much Cable One should pay Viacom to carry those channels. Viacom wants more money, which Cable One isn’t willing to pay — it’s one of many retransmission fights, which we have seen happen frequently over the last few years.

Viacom on the other hand sticks to its take and puts the blame squarely on Cable One. A Viacom spokesperson sent us the following statement via email:

“Cable One has chosen to no longer carry Viacom programming and, as a result, it is no longer available to Cable One customers in any form.”

Cable One isn’t the only provider affected by these types of online blackouts. Customers of Liberty Cablevision of Puerto Rico also can’t access Viacom programming online, and the American Cable Association, which represents smaller cable providers, estimates that dozens of its other smaller member companies could soon be affected as well. The group has been lobbying to get the FCC’s attention, arguing in a filing with the FCC that Viacom’s move goes against the idea of net neutrality:

“Viacom’s move to block a select group of broadband Internet customers regardless of whether they subscribed to the operators’ video offerings or not is inconsistent with the fundamental tenet of Internet openness that the Commission’s vacated 2010 Open Internet Order championed.”

It looks like the FCC is starting to pay attention to these complaints. Asked about the conflict, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said during a hearing this week that it is a trend that “we should all worry about,” according to a Los Angeles Times report (hat tip to DSL Reports). Of course, this doesn’t mean that the FCC will, or even can, do anything about it any time soon, but the timing could help to put more pressure on the commission to enact stronger net neutrality regulations.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2014/05/23/comedy-central-mtv-blocked-cable-one-voacom-retrans-fight/feed/5Comedy Central launches new iOS app for South Park, Colbert and Jon Stewarthttps://gigaom.com/2014/04/01/comedy-central-launches-new-ios-app-for-south-park-colbert-and-jon-stewart/
https://gigaom.com/2014/04/01/comedy-central-launches-new-ios-app-for-south-park-colbert-and-jon-stewart/#commentsTue, 01 Apr 2014 17:36:49 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=831085Daily Show and other shows on the network.

]]>Fans of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert just got another way to catch up on the latest episodes from their favorite late-night faux journalists: Comedy Central launched an iOS app Tuesday that promises access to close to 200 episodes of a variety of the network’s shows, including full seasons of shows like Futurama and Chappelle’s Show.

Some of that content will only be available to viewers who authenticate with their pay TV provider, but next-day access to the Colbert Report, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and South Park will be available to all viewers, regardless of whether they subscribe to cable or not.

Interestingly enough, Comedy Central decided not to add any second-screen components that would for example deliver additional content to a tablet while viewers watch a show on TV to the app, and instead bills it as a “first-screen app.” That’s consistent with a move away from second-screen app experiences at other networks. In September, an ABC executive said that the network views second-screen apps as “a distraction.”

]]>South Park has been a cultural touchstone for so long that you might not even consciously remember just how long it’s aired. But this weekend, Comedy Central revealed the answer — 234 episodes, 16 seasons worth, or over five days straight.

The proof comes with the Ultimate South Park Marathon, an online-only descent into the complete run of South Park, leading up to the premiere of Season 17 this Wednesday.

Beginning on Saturday, Sept. 21 at 3 PM ET, Southparkstudios.com began a steady stream of every episode, interrupted only by ads for the sole sponsor, soccer video game FIFA 14. It’s doubtful that any really devoted fan will stay tuned for all 94 hours, 59 minutes and 40 seconds of the marathon, but if they do they’ll also get to check out creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s “Year of the Fan” commentary, as well as the documentary 6 Days to Air, which chronicles the process by which South Park is made.

I checked in on the marathon at a couple of different points throughout the weekend: Once on Saturday afternoon, just as it was reaching the end of Season 1, and then Sunday morning (at which point it was right in the middle of Season 4).

The amount of live-tweeting wasn’t huge, at least on the #spmarathon and #southparkmarathon tags, though there were a few fans checking in regularly.

watching South Park with little brother. he’s laughing just as much as I did when I was 10 and watching it. #SouthParkMarathon

Commercial interruptions only occurred in between episodes; while the one-to-two minute ads were exclusively for FIFA 14, there were at least four of them in rotation (always important in a marathon situation), and each was relatively funny and unique. Plus, they were just the right length for a bathroom break.

What I find fascinating about the South Park-a-thon is this: If you have or have ever had a cable subscription, you might remember an occasion when you’d turn on the TV and there’d be a movie you like playing on some basic cable station — a movie you like enough, in fact, to own on DVD.

But instead of getting up and playing the DVD of the movie, so you can watch from the beginning, commercial-free, you’ll sit there and watch it on cable, right to the end.

This might not be a universal experience, but it’s the best equivalent I can come up with for the South Park marathon — because every single episode being streamed as a part of it is available to watch right now on southparkstudios.com. Every episode has been available, in fact, since the site’s launch in 2008.

Of course, that presumes you feel the need to watch a specific episode of South Park, as opposed to just sinking into the experience of reconnecting with the animated hijinks of .

I’ve never been a huge fan of the series, but South Park is an impressive comedic achievement, and at the very least it’s hard not to admire something that has lasted for as long as it has. The ability to pop in and out on the show’s remarkable legacy over the next couple of days is perhaps the best way to celebrate that.

]]>There were a number of reports last week that Twitter was looking to do TV-related content deals with broadcast networks such as Viacom and NBC so that it could add video clips to its real-time stream, and now we have seen two deals announced that show the kind of thing Twitter has in mind: one with BBC America that was revealed (naturally) via a tweet, and an interesting arrangement with Comedy Central, both of which emerged over the weekend.

These deals reinforce something I tried to make clear in an earlier post about the company’s plans: namely, if you don’t like television then you’re probably not going to be very happy with the future of Twitter. The deal with BBC America — which is owned by BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the agency, and carries such popular shows as Doctor Who and Top Gear in the U.S. — will presumably see Twitter run clips from those shows inside its users’ streams, in much the same way it did with ESPN during March Madness.

TV shows inside your Twitter stream

There have been other such one-off deals — as well as arrangements like the one with the Weather Channel, which will bring weather clips into Twitter’s expanded tweets — but the BBC America partnership seems to be the first one that involves an entire channel and potentially all of their shows, and it could easily be the prototype for further such deals. But will users react positively or negatively to all of this real-time video showing up in their Twitter streams?

Meanwhile, Twitter is also launching a somewhat different project with the Comedy Central channel that illustrates just how much the company wants to bring video as an experience inside the stream: the network is launching what it calls a five-day “comedy festival,” but all of the content will appear within Twitter, and most of it will be either created or distributed via Twitter’s recent video acquisition, Vine — which is designed for video clips of six seconds or less.

According to a report in the New York Times about the arrangement, a number of comedians — including legends like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner — will be posting video snippets of comedy routines as well as jokes using the hashtag #ComedyFest. On Tuesday, comedian Steve Agee will reportedly host a “Vine Dining” party as part of the festival, in which he and others will tell stories in six-second video clips that will be hosted and distributed by the Twitter network.

Video plus brands equals ad dollars

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post last week about the rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, these moves are just part of Twitter’s ongoing plans to not only host TV and video content on the network, but to monetize it (or help its creators monetize it) as well. In addition to Vine, one of the recent acquisitions that could help Twitter do that is Bluefin Labs, which specializes in tracking the real-time data about who is watching what show.

That kind of information — along with the data from Twitter’s partnership with Nielsen, announced last year — would in turn help Twitter appeal to advertisers who are looking for as much targeting information as they can get. And that appeal could be paying off already: according to a report from the Financial Times on Monday, Twitter has signed a major multi-year deal worth “hundreds of millions of dollars” with Starcom MediaVest Group, a large ad-buying firm that represents clients like Walmart and Coca-Cola.

Moves like these — and the launch of Twitter Music last week — reinforce just how much the company has evolved away from its original nature as a short-messaging service that gave you only 140 characters or less, and could be consumed quickly. Now, it is becoming a lot more like a broadcast network, or at least a willing handmaiden for broadcast networks, as CEO Dick Costolo predicted in a speech last year. But is that what users really want from Twitter?

This post was updated on April 24 to note that BBC America is a unit of BBC Worldwide and not a joint venture with Discovery Channel as was originally stated.

]]>Amazon continues to ramp up the amount of video content it offers for free to its Amazon Prime subscribers. On Wednesday it announced a deal with Viacom that will bring the number of titles available as part of its Prime Instant Videos service to more that 15,000, or three times the amount of content it launched the service with.

We’ve included a list of the programming Amazon picked up below from Viacom networks such as Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon. Perhaps most interesting in the list are MTV hit Jersey Shore and a wide range of Nickelodeon programming, which could help Amazon enamor itself to subscribers with children.

But the one thing that’s missing from the service is the ability to subscribe without linking the service to Amazon Prime, which gives customers free two-day shipping. While it’s a nice perk, especially to Amazon Prime subscribers like me who overuse the free shipping, not everyone is as interested in that part of the offering. That’s rumored to change, as Amazon could unbundle the video offering from the Prime subscription.

If it ever does roll out a standalone service, Amazon’s quick addition of new content puts it in a position to be a real competitor to Netflix, which is slowly rebounding from last summer’s price increase and customer dissatisfaction around its plans to unbundle and rebrand its DVD-by-mail service. While Netflix’s domestic subscriptions have begun growing again after a down third quarter, the company is seeing increased competition from the likes of Amazon, Hulu Plus and will soon face a new streaming service from Redbox and Verizon.

]]>Broadband ISP Frontier Communications has been trying to find new ways to provide value to its subscribers, and to do so it is rolling out one of the most comprehensive video portals online. With the launch of TumTiki, Frontier is bringing together more than 700,000 video assets from a combination of traditional broadcast TV and online sources.

Frontier’s EVP of Revenue Development, Melinda White, told us in an interview last week that “tum” means “all” and “tiki” means “idol.” Essentially, the site seeks to bring as many stars from movies and TV series together as possible. In terms of its breadth of content, the site accomplishes that, with hundreds of thousands of videos to choose from.

White said that about 90 percent of all videos on the site are free and ad-supported, with others available for purchase. Content includes TV episodes from networks like ABC, Fox, NBC, Bravo, FX, AMC, Comedy Central and TBS. Hulu and Amazon are primary content partners, but unlike other sites that link to their content, their video players are embedded on the site, meaning that TumTiki users never have to leave to watch the content they want.

In addition to network content, TumTiki also has a large selection of local content, targeted at viewers throughout its footprint. The company serves more than 27 states, and it has videos focused on sports, news and other local subjects. TumTiki also has a sizable selection of web original videos through a partnership with providers like Yahoo.

In addition to its content, TumTiki is also hoping to entice viewers with social features, like allowing its users to create and share video playlists with their friends on social networks. This allows their friends to modify and collaborate on playlists. There’s also a gamification aspect to the site, with users able to earn badges and virtual rewards.

Frontier is primarily a telco and broadband ISP, but it has been trying to enter into the video space: It has 3.2 million subscribers, with 556,000 video subscribers. TumTiki is part of its effort to provide more value to broadband customers and to grab more revenues through advertising and video sales.

At the same time, building a video aggregation site — even one with as many videos as TumTiki — seems a little archaic in this day and age. After all, while Frontier is focused on building a free-to-all, ad-based video site, other service providers are busy building authenticated websites in which you must show you’re a subscriber before you get access to certain bits of content.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2011/11/07/tumtiki/feed/0Sheen vs. Kutcher: Guess who was #winning?https://gigaom.com/2011/09/20/sheen-vs-kutcher-twitter/
https://gigaom.com/2011/09/20/sheen-vs-kutcher-twitter/#commentsTue, 20 Sep 2011 14:33:35 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=408098Roast of Charlie Sheen on Twitter, and it looks like the bet may have paid off: Twitter users commented more than twice as much about the roast than about the season debut of his former show Two and a Half Men.

]]>Monday night, Twitter was abuzz with comments on both the first episode of Two and a Half Men with its new star Ashton Kutcher as well as Comedy Central’s Roast of Charlie Sheen.

Judging from early tweet counts, it looks like Sheen was #winning one more time: Social media monitoring company Visible Technologies counted more than twice as many tweets about the roast when compared to those about Two and a Half Men:

That result is even more impressive if you consider that Charlie Sheen himself was among those tweeting about his former TV show. But Comedy Central heavily promoted the social media angle of its roast, including the official hashtag #SheenRoast. And it looks like the network also had some help from Amy Schumar, whose appearance dominated the conversation on Twitter:

One could of course argue that the typical CBS viewer may be less tempted to tweet than his Comedy Central counterpart, but the network may see an overall social media bost from Kutcher being on the show as well: The actor currently has around 7.6 million Twitter followers.

]]>https://gigaom.com/2011/09/20/sheen-vs-kutcher-twitter/feed/1Netflix Adds Yo Gabba Gabba & iCarlyhttps://gigaom.com/2011/05/23/netflix-yo-gabba-gabba-icarly/
https://gigaom.com/2011/05/23/netflix-yo-gabba-gabba-icarly/#commentsMon, 23 May 2011 14:08:28 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=348850Yo Gabba Gabba to its streaming catalog. The company also added new episodes of iCarly and a bunch of other content from Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and MTV.

]]>Good news for parents and their offspring: Netflix is adding Yo Gabba Gabba, new episodes of iCarly and a bunch of other shows for toddlers, preteens and teens to its streaming video catalog. The company announced on its blog Sunday that is has added new content from a number of Viacom cable channels, which include Nickelodeon, MTV, VH1, Logo, Spike and Comedy Central.

Some of the content already added over the weekend includes the first season of Yo Gabba Gabba, the third season of Wonder Pets as well as new episodes of Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants. Netflix also added some fare for slightly older viewers, including the Roast of David Hasselhoff, the first season of the MTV show Teen Mom and the Drawn Together Movie.

Netflix has long had lots of kids content on its service. The company added a number of Nickelodeon shows last summer, and in March recently started bring a number of seasons of Sesame Street online.

Netflix is also working on making it easier to separate this kind of content from the movies and shows slightly older viewers might be interested in. It announced earlier this year that it is slowly moving towards a family plan model that could include separate queues for each member of the household.